This movie seems depressing at first, and its view of the future is very bleak, but ultimately good triumphs. Yet the story is not sappy at all. They took a big risk by setting the film in the near future, 2027, but it pays off. Highly recommended. Great acting, plot moves right along, plausible. Clive Olwen and Julianne Moore play convincing, warts and all characters, and I had no idea a certain prominent character was played by Michael Caine until I read the credits. If you know any old lefties personally, the characters in the film will seem familiar to you. The bad guys are a little too bad, but as no one can be trusted for long, the movie can't be said to be propaganda. It is violent but not gratuitously so. I haven't read the book so can't comment on the relationship between the book and the movie.
Reviews
3 Reviews
Tristram Shandy
(2005)
Low , Stupid, But Inspiring Helpless Laughter
26 February 2006
Warning: Spoilers
There is some actual Tristam Shandy from the novel in the movie, but really the movie is about the making of the movie. The actors Coogan and Brydon fight and tease each other continually throughout. The movie opens with Brydon going on and on about his teeth and his appearance to Coogan, and I thought, how am I going to get through the rest of this? If hadn't been for the $10.75 and the cold outside, I would have gotten up and left. Coogan and Brydon are just like actors I have known in real life, narcissistic and not much interested in the intellect. In the last scene they were doing the same thing and I was laughing and unable to stop, although they still irritated me. Brydon was going on and on about how he takes from Streisand and Pacino and imitates both of them. Brydon also imitates Coogan. Apparently Coogan is much more of a star than Brydon and Brydon is jealous of him, but as I don't watch British TV I'm not really sure if this was all made up for the film.
Coogan has a minor love interest, Jenny, who is black and another, more serious girlfriend also named Jenny (white), who visits the hotel the movie is using as a base, with her baby by Coogan. He neglects both of them. The first Jenny is a sort of gofer who is forced to continually interact with Coogan even after meeting her rival, and is held to be ridiculous because she admires Fassbinder films. Her interest in Coogan remains even after she realized the position Coogan has put her in with the second Jenny. As an audience member I felt a little like Jenny, laughing despite myself, as if I had a hopeless crush on some jerk, and mocked by the film for expecting it to have some intellectual content. But yet it was an experience well worth the price of admission. Coogan is held by Brydon to have lost his libido, but the film delivers.
What it delivers I'm not exactly sure.
Coogan has a minor love interest, Jenny, who is black and another, more serious girlfriend also named Jenny (white), who visits the hotel the movie is using as a base, with her baby by Coogan. He neglects both of them. The first Jenny is a sort of gofer who is forced to continually interact with Coogan even after meeting her rival, and is held to be ridiculous because she admires Fassbinder films. Her interest in Coogan remains even after she realized the position Coogan has put her in with the second Jenny. As an audience member I felt a little like Jenny, laughing despite myself, as if I had a hopeless crush on some jerk, and mocked by the film for expecting it to have some intellectual content. But yet it was an experience well worth the price of admission. Coogan is held by Brydon to have lost his libido, but the film delivers.
What it delivers I'm not exactly sure.
Casanova
(2005)
I really wanted to like this but couldn't.
25 February 2006
It's beautiful to look at, 18th century Venice was beautiful, and the love interest between the fiancée's mother and the fiancée's intended husband was an unexpected bonus, showing that there's plenty of passion after thirty. I loved the initiation scene between the formerly hapless boy and the prostitutes, however far from real life it may have been. I thought the acting was adequate, and it was an amusing premise.
However, I was bored. Casanova should be about sexual love, and there wasn't enough sex in the movie. There were a lot of smoldering glances that never amounted to much. I felt that more of the erotic scenes should have been consummated, not necessarily that every little thing had to be shown on camera, but Casanova is not still famous two and a half centuries later because he was an accomplished flirt.
However, I was bored. Casanova should be about sexual love, and there wasn't enough sex in the movie. There were a lot of smoldering glances that never amounted to much. I felt that more of the erotic scenes should have been consummated, not necessarily that every little thing had to be shown on camera, but Casanova is not still famous two and a half centuries later because he was an accomplished flirt.
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